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Eyes on Trade is a blog by the staff of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch (GTW) division. GTW aims to promote democracy by challenging corporate globalization, arguing that the current globalization model is neither a random inevitability nor "free trade." Eyes on Trade is a space for interested parties to share information about globalization and trade issues, and in particular for us to share our watchdogging insights with you! GTW director Lori Wallach's initial post explains it all.

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December 18, 2008

Political Brain Surgery and Fair Trade

Psychologist Drew Westen’s The Political Brain was one of the most influential books of 2007, and released right after the fair-trade sweep of Congress in 2006. Like the work of linguist George Lakoff,
Westen’s work does not advise candidates what positions they should
take, but rather how they should communicate about their positions,
whatever these might be. Drawing on knowledge from the field of
cognitive science, Westen finds that voters are more responsive to
candidates and platforms that carry emotional resonance for them. Among
the major communication tactics that Westen considers:

Emotionally evocative language: “Progressives have to stop using the
kind of language that has left the left so right but so wrong, such as
‘Poverty is a serious social problem,’ ‘We have to do more to protect
the environment,’ and ‘Income disparities in the country have increased
at an alarming rate.’ If you didn’t feel anything as you read those
phrases, you’re not alone. This doesn’t mean those on the left have to
give up their values and principles to win elections. It means they
have to describe them with emotional clarity.” (258)

Framing: “The most prominent contemporary examples of framing,
beginning with the Contract with America, have been the handiwork of
Frank Luntz, who has recently disclosed some memos written to provide
Republicans with ‘translations’ for common phrases that didn’t serve
them well. For foreign trade, he substituted international trade… Luntz
recommended using words that evoked the right [neural] networks, rather
than those that elicited little emotions or unintended negative
associations to Republican policies (e.g., the word foreign). A
perennial problem for the Democrats has been the failure to recognize
Trojan horses that smuggle in frames from the other side.” (265)

Principled stands: “the level [of cognitive categorization] that
appears to have the most emotional impact in politics is … a principled
stand. A principled stand is neither an abstraction (too superordinate)
nor a detailed policy proposal (too subordinate). Unfortunately, these
seem to be the two levels toward which Democratic minds naturally
gravitate. A principled stand has clear implications for policy, but it
does not lay out the specifics of programs. Rather, it is an
emotionally compelling application of a value or ideological principle
to a particular issue or problem.” (270)

Using the whole brain: “Successful campaigns present both positive
and negative messages. The reason is less political than neurological:
it is inherent in the structure of the human brain. Positive and
negative emotions are not the opposite of each other. They are
psychologically distinct, mediated by different neural circuits, and
affect voting in different ways. Focusing primarily on the positive and
leaving the negative to chance is simply ceding half the brain to the
opposition.” (250)

Westen explains how Gov. Mike Huckabee might have gone further in
the Republican primaries if, ironically, he had been an even angrier
“populist” than he was. Instead, he spoke in the emotional tones of a
pastor trying to lead his flock to their “better angels.” Similarly,
Westen says Democrats are missing many voters by not evoking both angry
and compassionate emotional cues. (427)

One some level, these insights are not brain surgery (pun intended).
Any good labor or community organizer, for instance, knows that she
must move the people she hopes to organize through a cycle of
“anger-hope-action.” In other words, people must be shaken out of
apathy by anger at their problems, convinced that something can be done
about their problems before the anger turns to depression, and then
moved swiftly into taking action that will build power and help them
solve their problems.

These insights shed light on:

Why many Democrats with anti-fair trade voting records and
platforms (or who completely omitted any sort of criticisms of trade
policy in their campaigns) have had difficulties in the electoral
arena. Such candidates take away a very convenient means of expressing
anger at status-quo economic policies if they do not discuss the unfair
direction of global-economic policy. (Many of these candidates are
milquetoast in their emotional appeals across a wide range of issues –
a topic for another study);

Why Democrats, as they shifted to a frame of anger at our failed
trade policies that they had avoided during the Clinton and early Bush
years, picked up so many seats in the 2006 congressional races;

Why the role of anger at NAFTA continued to play such a prominent role in the Democratic presidential primaries;

Why Obama and many successful congressional candidates
deemphasized specific reforms to trade agreements in their public
communications in the 2008 general election. This makes profound
political sense, as any of the words in the phrase “free trade
agreement” could be just as likely to activate positive as negative
emotional cues. Indeed, the phrase is a work of corporate branding,
rather than an accurate description of the pacts, which often raise
barriers to “free trade” in patented essential medicines, go far beyond
the reach of narrow “trade” policy, and are never the outcome of an
open and deliberative international process where everyone shares their
views and comes to agreement. It is telling that, in spite of the
possible positive associations with “freedom” and “agreement,”
increasing numbers of Americans respond negatively to pollsters when
asked about “free trade agreements,” as we showed above. It is likely,
however, that public anger towards the phrase is near the maxing-out
point, which is why it is propitious that many candidates are shifting
their phraseology. Out of 137 paid trade TV ads in the current election
cycle, only eleven mentioned the phrase “free trade” or “trade
agreement.” Over four times as many (45) mentioned instead “NAFTA,”
“CAFTA,” “trade pact,” “trade deal,” or “unfair trade” – phrases that
carry a negative or neutral connotation, and have the advantages of
being more accurate and containing fewer syllables. The remainder
emphasized the unfairness of the offshore tax evasion issue. While this
represented over half of the total ads, it is worth noting that the
number of ads mentioning some form of trade deal were still nearly
double the total number of trade ads on any topic in the 2006 cycle;

Why successful candidates crafted messaging that juxtaposed anger
at “tax breaks for companies that shift our jobs overseas,” with hope
around the issue of “green jobs in the future,” and action around
voting for the Democratic candidate. This issue matrix has the benefit
of being very easy to understand at a gut level, which unfortunately we
cannot say about, for instance, NAFTA’s investor-state mechanisms which
incentivize offshoring. In the primaries, “NAFTA” was the proxy for
failed trade policy. But then, after seeing the initial emotional
success of the NAFTA proxy, media pundits forced the candidates deep
into the policy weeds of U.S.-Canada bilateral relations (such as
Canada’s commitment under NAFTA to send oil to the United States,
irrespective of domestic economic conditions). In contrast, the
offshore tax loophole frame that was added during the general election
is hard to atomize into wonky minutiae, thus making it a powerful proxy
for the complicated array of policies connected to the public’s
negative emotive reaction to how the current trade and globalization
regime has undermined their wellbeing. While McCain and many pundits
might be pro-NAFTA, who could be for something so patently unfair as
cutting taxes for corporations that offshore jobs? Indeed, to our
knowledge, no Republican candidates that were accused of favoring these
loopholes stood up in ads or debates to publicly defend the unfair
practice, although presumably many would have if the issue was NAFTA,
for which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bush administration have
long prepared many (if inaccurate and misleading) projections of jobs
gained from exports to Canada and Mexico);

Why some Republicans with fair-trade voting records and platforms
were not as successful as their Democratic fair-trade challengers. They
could evoke the anger frames of the fair-trade movement, but not
deliver much in the way of hope with their other anti-middle class
initiatives; and finally

Why the DSCC and DCCC actually invested resources in 2008 in fair-trade messaging and candidates.

For the first time in modern history, the individuals at the top of the
Democratic Party establishment – Barack Obama, his campaign advisor
David Axelrod, and Rahm Emanuel, along with a growing number of
consultants – got their start in political life through community
organizing and public-interest organizations. Discussions of how to
frame issues and enemies, of how to utilize tactics and messages that
build power, are part and parcel of the organizing experience that
these individuals are now employing in their campaigns.

Politicians are starting to realize that – not only do anti-NAFTA
messages resonate with the public, as polls and electoral outcomes show
– but that the emotional anger evoked by unfair trade deals are a
natural complement to the emotional hope brought on by green jobs and
middle-class tax cuts. This shift is, unfortunately, probably not an
indication of the ideological transformation of Emanuel, who helped
Bill Clinton pass NAFTA. While Emanuel did pen a Wall Street Journal
op-ed praising candidates for running against NAFTA, he failed to
grapple with the fair-trade movement’s longstanding contention that the
deregulatory policy model that the pact represented must be rolled
back. The shift is also not likely to generate a windfall in corporate
campaign contributions (although it is likely to help with grassroots
fundraising prospects). But it does show that the pairing of the
messages make strong sense from a political messaging perspective, and
the contribution that fair trade can make towards reestablishing the
pro-“working-class” brand of the party.